IT’S a shame that “The Trials of Henry Kissinger” doesn’t make the best case it can against the Nobel Prize-winning uber-diplomat, sacrificing more plausible charges in order to carelessly toss around – and therefore trivialize – words like “genocide.”

This enjoyably fast-moving, hard-hitting documentary (inspired by the Christopher Hitchens book) fails to persuade that its subject is a “war criminal” in any conventional sense of the term.

But it does establish that Kissinger was a monster whose foreign policies were marked by indifference to human life, and who, inspired by pessimistic cynicism, a love of deception, a lust for power and profound contempt for democracy, deceived Congress and the American people.

Filmmakers Alex Gibney and Eugene Jarecki are less successful in their efforts to explore Kissinger’s psyche, background and ideological beliefs (if any).

You do see how the disgusting, weirdly frivolous callousness of this dime-store Machiavelli prompted the United States to support savage regimes in Chile and Argentina (and marginally less barbarous ones in Greece and Iran), and to wink at sickening crimes committed by American allies, like the brutal Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975.

But it is far from clear that Kissinger scotched a genuine chance of peace in 1968, because that would have required inconceivable concessions by both North and South Vietnam.

And it certainly isn’t clear that the “secret” war against communist bases in Cambodia (which, contrary to the foolish or dishonest assertion here by Elizabeth Becker, did not begin with the Nixon administration) led inexorably to the Khmer Rouge’s killing fields. After all, it didn’t take U.S. bombing to prompt Mao to kill some 50 million people.

(You could even argue that it was America’s military abandonment of Indochina to Stalinist murderers – another manifestation of Kissingerian cynicism – that was the real crime.)

Was it illegal to hide the war from Congress? Yes.

Was it a “war crime?” No, at least not in the sense that Babi Yar was a war crime.

And if Kissinger’s chilling indifference to murder and torture by American allies is characterized as a “crime against humanity,” then what do we call the acts of people like Pinochet, who actually ordered and committed these crimes?

Still, this brisk, British-American co-production is one of the better political/historical documentaries to come out in some time.